Siberia is more dangerous than you might think: ancient spores of «zombie» virus are more dangerous than drones

Climate change is now doing more than just raising sea levels and bringing heatwaves to places where we used to find a refreshing breeze on summer days. It is literally unlocking history — and some of what’s locked in permafrost is biologically active and extremely dangerous.

An analysis of Yakutia’s melting permafrost (East Siberia) forecasted the following risk: due to permafrost depth thinning, there is a threat to historic cattle burial grounds where Siberian plague-infected carcasses lie. Permafrost contains living microorganisms which are not frozen due to the relatively high temperature of the environment (-2…-8 degrees C), but the microorganisms are immobilized for the moment. Bacillus anthracis spores can remain viable for decades to centuries in frozen soil, but under warming conditions, those spores may become mobile again. (Revich & Podolnaya, Glob Health Action, 2011). They are already in 8 out of 17 Yakutian region. Just for your notice, Yakutia is a region larger than all of Western Europe, 11 times the size of the United Kingdom, or 5 times the size of France. So if Yakutia were in Europe, it would stretch from Lisbon to the Ural Mountains — an entire continent in one administrative region. Now, imagine that permafrost melts not exclusively in Yakutia, but in all northern regions of Russia where infected cattle were buried.

The threat is not hypothetical. In 2016, an unusually hot summer on the Yamal Peninsula in Russia (perhaps) coincided with a severe anthrax outbreak that killed thousands of reindeer and hospitalized dozens of people — an event many investigators linked to thawing permafrost and exposure of old infected carcasses. The previous outbreak happened exactly a hundred years ago, took away the lives of 1.5 million deer in the Russian North. For the comparison, nowadays, there are 1.2 million domestic reindeer in Russia, or 62% of their global population, and about 1 million wild reindeer.

Scientific findings published in Nature, one of the most reliable and respected scientific journals, demonstrated that ancient large viruses from permafrost can be revived and remain infectious. Isolated giant viruses (pithoviruses, pandoraviruses, and relatives) date back ~48,000 years and remain capable of infecting amoebae in the lab. These discoveries prove that biological agents can survive deep freeze and later regain infectivity. There are almost 14,000 animal burial sites in Russia Surface and active-layer warming directly increases the risk that spores will be exposed or mobilized into grazing areas or water.

The science is unequivocal: permafrost thaw is increasing, and it is already associated with real disease outbreaks. Unfortunately, many historic burial sites are unmapped, undocumented, or have lost records; this makes them risk areas, especially in an area of tourism and active exploration of remote northern areas. We believe that only together, by co-operative work in permafrost monitoring, sharing protocols, coworking on genomic databases, and combining international multidisciplinary research in climate science, microbiology, and public health, we can hold this unseen microscopic world.